Pentimento

Pentimento

A pentimento is an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his mind as to the composition during the process of painting...

: A Book of Portraits is a 1973 autobiographical book by American writer Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman

Lillian Florence "Lily" Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...

, which details the author's purported relationship with Julia, a woman who resisted the Nazis in pre-war Germany.

Film adaptation

The Oscar-winning film Julia was based on Pentimento. Upon the film's release, in 1977, New York psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner claimed that she was the basis for the title character and that she had never known Hellman. Hellman denied that the character was based on Gardiner. However, the fact that Hellman and Gardiner had the same lawyer (Wolf Schwabacher), that the lawyer had been privy to Gardiner's memoirs, and that the events in the film conform to those in the memoirs, have led some to conclude that they had been appropriated by Hellman without attribution to Gardiner.